Читаем Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974 полностью

“My pleasure,” he said. “Take your time.”

I walked down to the doorway, stood looking about the living room inside for a moment, and then stepped in.

It wasn’t the kind of room you’d want to spend much time in if you were subject to nightmares. It had two bright-orange walls, one blood-red wall, and one wall painted dull black with silver lightning flashes zigzagging across it from all directions. Most of the furniture was made of chrome pipe, twisted into futuristic curves and angles and strung with fishnetting dyed pink and green and purple.

The room looked like an explosion in a paint factory, even without the bilious yellow carpet and the dozen or so colored mobiles that festooned the ceiling.

Looking very much out of place was a quite ordinary combination bar and hi-fi cabinet, and scattered about the room were a black sheath dress, a pair of very small black suede pumps, and a few wisps of black lace lingerie.

There was a draped archway in one of the orange walls, with the drapes parted just far enough for me to see the corner of a bed.

“Police officer,” I called. “Anyone that’s in there, come out.”

Aside from the muted hiss of a needle circling in the safety grooves of a record on the hi-fi’s turntable, there was no sound of any kind.

I switched off the hi-fi and walked through the archway to the bedroom, which surprised me by being as commonplace as the living room was otherwise.

Beyond the bedroom was a small bathroom, and beyond that an almost equally small kitchen. But there was no one, and nothing of any immediate interest, in either place.

I started back toward the bedroom. If there was anyone in the apartment, he — or she — would have to be in the bedroom closet or on the floor beneath the bed.

Of so I thought. As it turned out, he was in neither place. He was in the living room, lying on the floor between the sofa and the wall, where he’d been hidden from me by the furniture and the half-open hall door when I came in.

He lay on his back, a handsome, even-featured man in his early forties, with overlong hair the color of wet sand, a pencil-line mustache, and wide-set gray eyes that stared up at me with the dry, lusterless film of death.

He was lying with both arms folded tightly across his middle, as if he’d been hugging himself against the cold, and spreading out at either side of his forearms were dark blotches, stark and ragged-edged against the white of his sport shirt.

According to the rule book, of course, a cop doesn’t touch a body until it’s been examined by the Medical Examiner or one of his assistants.

Of course.

I reached down and, very carefully, grasping only the thumbs, lifted his forearms away from his chest.

There were four bullet holes, none of them more than two inches from the others, and all of them made at such close range that the cloth around them was not only stained with burned powder but charred by the muzzle blast.

They were very small holes, and if they turned out to have been made by anything bigger than a .22, I was going to be very much surprised.

I lowered the arms to their original position, walked back to the living room, picked up the black sheath dress and the suede pumps, and went out to where I’d left Stan Rayder and the naked girl.

It was hard to believe that she was the same girl I’d almost dived off the roof with. She was sitting up now, holding my jacket tightly against the front of her body, watching my approach with just about the same degree of irritation she might have shown had I surprised her while she was taking a sun bath in the raw.

Still, when I reached her, I saw that she was breathing a little raggedly, and that she seemed to have all she could do to keep her lips from trembling.

Stan Rayder was leaning against the wall, studying per bemusedly. “She’s okay now, Pete,” he said. “She snapped out of it, just like that.”

“So I see,” I said. I put the shoes down on the floor beside her and dropped the dress across her thighs.

“They’re yours, aren’t they?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Better put them on,” I said. “There’ll be a lot of people around here any minute now.”

She hesitated for a moment. Then, still holding my jacket in front of her with one hand, she reached for the dress with the other and made a tentative effort to get to her feet. “Look the other way,” she said.

Stan and I walked down the hall a few steps and turned to face the open door of the apartment I had just left.

“Anybody home down there?” Stan asked me!

“There’s a man between the wall and the sofa in the living room. Somebody hit him four times with a small-caliber gun. You could cover all four wounds with a dollar bill.” I gestured back toward the girl. “She say anything?”

“Just her name. She says it’s Doris Hagen. And she didn’t even say that until just before you got back. She came out of it all at once, but she’d lost her voice. Which figures. The way she was screaming up on that roof, she’s lucky to get it back at all.”

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